The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 7 | Page 5

machine, are not conceived or composed
unconsciously and at haphazard. Byron did not "whistle" _Don Juan_
"for want of thought." He had found a thing to say, and he meant to
make the world listen. He had read with angry disapproval, but he had
read, Coleridge's _Critique on_ [Maturin's] _Bertram_ (_vide post_, p.
4, note 1), and, it may be, had caught an inspiration from one brilliant
sentence which depicts the Don Juan of the legend somewhat after the
likeness of Childe Harold, if not of Lord Byron: "Rank, fortune, wit,
talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty
of person, vigorous health, ... all these advantages, elevated by the
habits and sympathies of noble birth and natural character, are ...
combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all
its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature ... Obedience
to nature is the only virtue." Again, "It is not the wickedness of Don
Juan ... which constitutes the character an abstraction, ... but the rapid
succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual
superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable
qualities as coexistent with entire wickedness in one and the same
person." Here was at once a suggestion and a challenge.
Would it not be possible to conceive and to depict an ideal character,

gifted, gracious, and delightful, who should "carry into all its practical
consequences" the doctrine of a mundane, if not godless doctrine, and,
at the same time, retain the charities and virtues of uncelestial but not
devilish manhood? In defiance of monition and in spite of resolution,
the primrose path is trodden by all sorts and conditions of men, sinners
no doubt, but not necessarily abstractions of sin, and to assert the
contrary makes for cant and not for
righteousness. The form and
substance of the poem were due to the compulsion of Genius and the
determination of Art, but the argument is a vindication of the natural
man. It is Byron's "criticism of life." _Don Juan_ was _taboo_ from the
first. The earlier issues of the first five cantos were doubly anonymous.
Neither author nor publisher subscribed their names on the title-page.
The book was a monster, and, as its maker had foreseen, "all the world"
shuddered. Immoral, in the sense that it advocates immoral tenets, or
prefers evil to good, it is not, but it is unquestionably a dangerous book,
which (to quote Kingsley's words used in another connection) "the
young and innocent will do well to leave altogether unread." It is
dangerous because it ignores resistance and presumes submission to
passion; it is dangerous because, as Byron admitted, it is "now and then
voluptuous;" and it is dangerous, in a lesser degree, because, here and
there, the purport of the quips and allusions is gross and offensive. No
one can take up the book without being struck and arrested by these
violations of modesty and decorum; but no one can master its contents
and become possessed of it as a whole without perceiving that the
mirror is held up to nature, that it reflects spots and blemishes which,
on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into _natural_ and so
comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the
grossness of _Don Juan_. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by
the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of
Fielding, is _nihil ad rem_, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3,
1819) charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," he laughs
himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse and "the Zoili of
Albemarle Street" talked to him "about morality," he flames out, "I
maintain that it is the most moral of poems." He looked upon his great
work as a whole, and he knew that the "_raison d'être_ of his song" was
not only to celebrate, but, by the white light of truth, to represent and
exhibit the great things of the world--Love and War, and Death by sea

and land, and Man, half-angel, half-demon--the comedy of his fortunes,
and the tragedy of his passions and his fate.
_Don Juan_ has won great praise from the great. Sir Walter Scott
(_Edinburgh Weekly Journal_, May 19, 1824) maintained that its
creator "has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every
string of the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and

heart-astounding tones." Goethe (_Kunst und Alterthum_, 1821 [ed.
Weimar, iii. 197, and _Sämmtliche Werke_, xiii. 637]) described _Don
Juan_ as "a work of boundless genius." Shelley (letter to Byron,
October 21, 1821), on the receipt of Cantos III., IV., V., bore testimony
to his "wonder and delight:" "This poem carries with it at once the
stamp of originality and defiance of imitation. Nothing